In a move that will surprise exactly no one, LucasArts and Traveller's Tales have announced that another game in the LEGO pop culture series is in development, this time focusing on the Star Wars cartoon spin-off. LEGO Star Wars III: The Clone Wars will ship for the Wii, DS, PS3, PSP, Xbox 360 and PC in the fall of 2010.
"LucasArts continues to set the bar for next-generation family entertainment," said Darrell Rodriguez, president of LucasArts. "The LEGO® Star Wars franchise is a massive hit with fans, bringing in sales of over 20 million units worldwide. We're thrilled to extend this experience to LEGO® Star Wars III: The Clone Wars, delivering the humor and fun players expect from this award winning franchise."
"LucasArts is an amazing partner, and working with them on the next iteration of the LEGO® Star Wars series continues to be a great experience," said Tom Stone, director at TT Games. "The team at TT is working hard at making this simply the best LEGO® game ever with all new gameplay and features never before seen in a LEGO® game."
LEGO Star Wars III: The Clone Wars will feature all the characters from both seasons of the animated series, as well as some from the films. The game will include all-new battle modes featuring head-to-head combat, and an upgraded level builder, allowing you to create customized bases and in-game battlefields. You'll have the option to play as a Jedi or a Separatist with all-new abilities such as Squad command, Lightsaber slicing, Lightsaber jumps, long-distance Jedi attacks and Grapple Tie-ups.
Hm. I don't know... I loved the original LEGO Star Wars for its simplicity. It sounds like they might be making things a bit too complicated. Also, I'm not sure the Clone Wars TV series is a strong enough property, even with Star Wars in the title. (Possibly why the subtitle is so small compared to the rest of the title...) But what do I know? I'm kind of over the LEGO thing anyway. My LEGO Batman is still sitting on the shelf unfinished, and sometimes I think I hear it crying. I might just be losing my mind, though...
Okay, once again, Microsoft hasn't put out a press release about what to expect in the way of Lips DLC in February, despite the fact that we're already a week in, and there's already been three songs released. Thankfully, someone in the Lips Forums saw fit to post the upcoming DLC for February, and even went as far as to post for March. Now, that would lead me to suspect that this might not be kosher, but it turned out that the January DLC I saw posted in the forums was right, so even though this is a different user, I'm gonna go ahead and post it here. We'll see what's right as the weeks go by.
Last week we had a Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell song pack and separate releases of "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," "Ain't Nothing Like The Real Thing" and "You're All I Need To Get By." After the break, you'll find the next seven weeks laid out for you (It's a long list!)...
Name: Guy B.
Age: 29
Location: DFW, TX
Gay, Straight or Bi: Straight, but slightly irregular
Relationship Status: Married (by Elvis!) for three glorious years!
Consoles you own: 360, PS3, Wii, iPhone, DSi, DS, PSP, GB Micro, GBASP, Game Boy, Dreamcast, N64, SNES, Genesis, NES
Adult Swim Games has done something amazing. They may have created the single gayest flash game of all time. It's a robot unicorn smashing giant metal stars, an occasional sparkly dolphin, and a looping Erasure soundtrack. It's Robot Unicorn Attack!
The game is basically Canabult with a unicorn and rainbow skin. The only controls are to jump and smash. The dolphins seem to appear when you are doing well. I dunno why, but it's surprisingly fun! You have to see it for yourself.
Robot Unicorn Attack [AdultSwimGames]
[via: JayisGames]
We've had a few run-ins with EA's rather particular methods of marketing their latest action scythe-em-up, Dante's Inferno. They've included relatively tame challenges to game journalists, including a cake shaped like a human arm for Gluttony, and a random check for Greed. The fan challenge was far more depressing and even dangerous to some industry females, as it rewarded fans at Comic Con for "commiting acts of lust" with the booth babes, a prize which our own PixelPoet politely (but firmly) declined.
Well, EA's back with a more sneaky stunt to promote the game and reward fans, and this time there seems to be almost no potential for sexual harrassment. Good job, guys! Welcome to the 21st Century!
The theme this time is almost a blast from the past - if you remember the scares about subliminal messages and playing records backward to reveal satanic messages, you may be even more worried by the idea that your computer may have downloaded demonic imagery if you've visited sites like IGN, DailyMotion, Kotaku, and Digg in the past couple of days. How to tell if you've been exposed? Just right click and 'view page source.'
As you can see from the Kotaku example, the art appears in ASCII, and is also surrounded by a comment tag so it doesn't actually show in any page. It's entirely hidden, and those who stumble upon it will also find the address of an Inferno-linked site and one of six passwords to enter therein. Hunting down all the hellish text allows players to download a rather large EARTHLY_REWARDS kit with wallpapers, concept art, music, etc. While this likely qualifies even less as an ARG than last week's Heavy Rain reveal, it's still an interesting promo for those dedicated enough to make use of it.
For any others interested in facing damnation, Dante's Inferno will be available tomorrow in the U.S. and saw a release last week in Europe and Australia.
The middle installment of a trilogy is notoriously tricky ground to tread - while every story ought to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, second installments of trilogies can end up simply being a glorified middle - Halo 2 springs to mind, as do a number of scifi/fantasy fiction trilogies.
Perhaps the most successful thing about Mass Effect 2, above and beyond the incredibly improved graphics and tightened, overhauled combat system, is its narrative momentum and identity. The first game spent a great deal of time setting up the Mass Effect universe and positioning Commander Shepard to be a powerful force in the galaxy's political world - so much so that the sequel comes in for a smooth landing, its world ready-made, and proceeds to tell a whopper of a story.
There are some minor stumbles along the way and a giant elephant of a bad voice actor in the male Shepard, but these stand out more because of the level of polish on the rest of the game than for their own demerits. If the first Mass Effect left you feeling rather less than epic, the sequel will still likely impress.
This past weekend saw the Art History of Games Conference. Gamasutra has offered some insight about two of the talks that occurred there, reporting on both John Sharp and Frank Lantz's talks.
Sharp traced the trajectory of both art and of games. He looked at how both have been viewed through the ages and commented on how it was not until the High Renaissance that we started looking at art as leisure for those with money. It was no longer just in the service of religion or the personal.
Games, however, were tied in with more basic instincts, but fulfill many of the same roles. They can offer deeper meaning, provide room for introspection, et cetera. However, the last note argues against what Lantz calls the domestication of games: "In the end though, Sharp said that the relationship between games and art remains fraught. 'To display a game in a gallery is to take away a part of its game-ness.'"
Lantz seems to make a similar argument, saying that we need not change games to conform to ideas of what is art, but use games to change how we define art. After all, the definition of art is constantly changing, and having its boundaries pushed. This is true of any art form, and makes much more sense than trying to apply the principles of film, literature, and so forth to the medium of games wholesale.
Therefore, instead of asking, "Are games art?" our focus should be elsewhere. Instead of seeing art as a definition that needs be met, we should see it as a definition whose parameters can be expanded and encapsulate a new form.
For years, BioWare has been turning out some fantastic RPGs and has always been pushing the envelope when it comes to the choices and control you have over the characters in the games. One envelope they push in particular is what they allow for relationships in their games. With their past two major titles, Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2, BioWare has received both praise and disdain for both the inclusion and exclusion of relationship choices in their games when compared to past titles. Dragon Age: Origins proved to let the player take complete control of your character and allowed for multiple love interests with an array of companions. Mass Effect 2, however, seems to have taken a step back from its predecessor, which had a very controversial 'lesbian' scene in the game if you played a female Shepard. The sequel seems to be devoid of any promiscuity between Shepard and anyone of a similar sex, but does allow for some heterosexual love scenes between various characters, depending on your gender.
There's been some backlash on the forums, with players demanding to know why these love interests are missing, and the response of locking threads has made some upset; nevertheless, BioWare has been pretty quiet on information regarding the issue. In a recent interview with Ray Muzyka, one of the BioWare founders, Andrew Smee over at IGN got a bit of a scoop as to reason for Shepard's apparent shyness with the same sex this time around:
"Dragon Age is a first person narrative, where you're taking on an origin and a role, and you are that character at a fundamental level. It's fundamentally about defining your character, including those kinds of concepts. In Mass Effect it's more a third person narrative, where you have a pre-defined character who is who he is, or she is."
"in Mass Effect it's more about Shepard as a defined character with certain approaches and worldviews, and that's just who he or she is. So we constrain the choice set somewhat, but enable more tactical choices and enable a deeper, richer personality, because it's more focused around defining one character, it's not as wide open"
"It's first person versus third person narrative, and the types of choices you get to make within that are related to that, whether you've got a pre-defined character or a wide-open character. Some of our games have been wide open, and some have been more constrained, and we'll probably continue both kinds of character development in the future."
Overall, he's basically saying that it's a difference in storytelling. In your first-person narratives you have complete control over who a character is and what the do, whereas in a third-person game, you are merely helping make decisions for an already defined character. While it is a bit of a cop out of a reason why the love interests aren't included (I'm still included to think that timeline/budget issues where a bigger reason) the conversation itself almost seemed to mirror an age old argument. If first-person is creating a character and third-person is merely control choices, then it comes down to being created that way or choosing to be that way, but that's just me oversimplifying a very bombastic issue, so take it with a large grain of salt.
A big thanks to Randy to bringing this article to our attention, and make sure you check out the rest of the interview with Ray Muzyka over at IGN.
Mass Effect 3 & Beyond [IGN]
Can I get a "Hell yes!" up in this piece? Seemingly out of nowhere, Sunsoft and Gaijinworks have announced that they will be bringing the classic Blaster Master series to WiiWare with a brand new adventure called Blaster Master: Overdrive. The new WiiWare title includes eight mutant bosses, tons of upgrades for the S.O.P.H.I.A. tank, and tons of nasty bad guys to blow up. All the classic action fans know and love gets represented here as "dungeons" will still occur in top down, shooter-focused caverns and players still cover the ground in between using one of the few fictional tanks that jumps.
I don't know about you, but as big of a fan of Metroidvania styled games, the original NES game is the first one that to really click with me and I've been hooked on the quirky subgenre ever since. Watching the video above brings back a flood of memories and the new art style seems to be keep the original title's look and feel really well (unlike some later installments that just looked 'ugs). I can't wait to give this a spin for myself!
Players can jump back into the only real SUV worth driving starting today and will only set you back 1000 Wii Points.
Well here's some great news that came completely out of nowhere: Blaster Master Overdrive hits WiiWare today, a follow up to the amazing NES original with a graphical style that looks like it was pulled right from the SNES. How can anyone resist a game with a Metroidvania level design (is that even an accurate description since Blaster Master came before the first Castlevania to use that design?) and boasting "hemoglobin-swilling terrors"?
Also this week is the bizzarre one-button game Tomena Sanner, think Canabalt starring a Japanese businessman with dinosaurs and dancing instead of leaping across buildings. This week also sees the WiiWare release of the flash and iPhone hit Bloons, which you can either spend $5 on or play for free here. The final WiiWare release of the week is Hubert the Teddy Bear Winter Games, a winter sports collection for kids pitting teddy bears against bunnies. In addition to these WiiWare releases, the Virtual console sees a single game released this week with Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom, the vegetable-tastic NES point and click adventure.
This week in the DSi shop gamers can download Oscar in Movieland, a remake from the Commodore Amiga back when mascot platformers were all the rage. Also this week is Link 'n' Launch, a tile swapping puzzle game to launch rockets into space. The iPhone hit tower defense game Fieldrunners finally comes to Nintendo's handheld this week. And finally, DSi gamers can get their Sudoku and Hangman fix with either Sudoku 4Pockets or Extreme Hangman.
Blaster Master Overdrive and Tomena Sanner are must-haves for me. Do any of this week's games catch your eye? Check out each game's full description after the break.
It's Weekend Recovery, your Monday morning, 9 AM intellectual gaming discussion fix. Have a suggestion for a Weekend Recovery topic? Send your ideas to mixvio@gaygamer.net and you might see your name on the grand marquee!
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It should be obvious to anyone who watches the news that, at least in the US, when it comes to how the public at large handles depictions of gratuitous violence or gratuitous sex, reactions usually vary wildly. We're used to violence on movies and television shows, to say nothing of the perpetual sport we as gamers partake in through gunning down criminals and generic "bad guys" through the course of any FPS or action game. We're "desensitized" to this, at least when our impetus is killing enemies in the name of a greater good, and most people don't really balk unless said killing is exceptionally graphic and excessive.
Yet when it comes to sex, and more specifically sexual crimes like rape, we typically have a threshold of tolerance significantly lower than what we're willing to put up with in terms of violence. Watch a movie about killing enemy soldiers and most people are okay with it, but if that same movie involved explicit depictions of rape (as is historically an unfortunate part of warfare in the past) people would have visceral responses of disgust.
Bitmob has a very thought provoking article up about this subject, and Omar Yusuf ventures forward with his own ruminations on why we as a society will tolerate participating (at least virtually) in acts of murder for entertainment, but are usually filled with repulsion if a game asked us to engage in rape. It mentions, as these topics usually do, the Japanese eroge game RapeLay, which we've discussed here before already.
Upcoming PS3 title Heavy Rain features a scene in which the player's female protagonist is forced by a male character to perform a striptease, and Quantic Dream's David Cage has said that the experience is not meant to be sexy but is instead intended to make players feel upset and uncomfortable. By reversing gender roles and making a largely heterosexual male demographic perform a degrading, humiliating act instead of simply watching it, Cage hopes that it will provoke a mature discussion on sexuality and sex in general. Whether his intention comes true or not won't be discovered until the game is released, but the scene in particular is already courting controversy in advance of the title's launch.
As Yusuf says, and I agree, criticisms against games like RapeLay are well-placed, and I think that it's a good thing that most of us find ourselves disgusted by them and would be incredibly uncomfortable if a game expected us to sexually assault enemies instead of killing them. But the overall message is that we, as a society, don't approach depictions of violence with the same measured tones as we do the subject of sexual crimes. I am certainly guilty of blasting away enemies in most action games without ever really thinking about what I'm doing, and this is largely a failure of most games to give you a reason to reflect to begin with. Some have tried, but the experience often falls short of socking you in the gut with the realization of what, in fact, you're actually doing. We accept violence and murder in our media, but are disgusted with sex-based crimes-- the latter is a good thing, because such violations should repulse and not excite us, but I do have to wonder why the former is just accepted "as is" without any of us really bothering to think about it.
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